An intriguing but familiar series of “channeled” meditations on the true nature of reality.
In this debut spiritual book, a seeker gains wisdom from a celestial Lion during a vision quest.
“Are you ready to carry my legacy?” asks a magnificent, larger-than-life Lion to the narrator of Shankari’s work, a book she refers to as “channeled” through her by the universe itself rather than actually written by the author. (It will be the judgment call of each reader as to how to categorize the volume.) In the fervid dream world that carries the narrative forward, the story begins with a man appearing to Shankari from a pure, primeval state in which humans live in complete harmony with the natural world. The man introduces Shankari to the Lion, who unfolds an entire worldview to the author in a series of discussions about life, faith, happiness, and a half-dozen other broad philosophical subjects that tend to crop up in spiritual/New Age texts of this kind. While Shankari is guided throughout by her own “wisdom,” which “constantly whispers my truth,” she receives from the Lion many lessons about the true nature of reality, realizing that the majestic being “was here to teach me to create a different reality than the one I was taught, than the one that was dictated to me.” The Lion’s teachings about this new reality will be very familiar to readers of modern spiritual works. “To understand the truth, one must be still,” the Lion tells the author at one point. “It is from stillness that answers and wisdom arise.” Also: “Life is an illusion.” In chapters smoothly interspersed with these and other earnest revelations, Shankari addresses readers directly, sometimes challenging their complacency (“Admit it, you don’t know what it is to live a life in truth”) and sometimes speaking in the kind of apothegms that fill the rest of this placid series opener: “If you cry that you have not felt love, consider that you have not allowed yourself to love yourself.” The Lion’s captivating thoughts about the true nature of existence will appeal to fans of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as will the story of a state of prelapsarian balance with nature.
An intriguing but familiar series of “channeled” meditations on the true nature of reality.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950282-41-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Bublish, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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